secret place. He didn’t seem to like the idea too much, so I let it go.
“Maybe we can let some of the other kids come over to the clubhouse and play with us,” I said as I tried to feel Johnny out on the subject.
“I don’t know, I kinda like it the way it is, I don’t need everyone in the neighborhood going down there.”
“Maybe some of the guys that play baseball with us can come down and we could have a Worlds Series of bottle caps,” I said.
“I said, I don’t want any other kids knowing about the place and let’s leave it at that,” Johnny said with his face turning red.
I was a little surprised by Johnny’s feelings, but we both ended up agreeing that we really did not want other kids knowing about our special place.
On our Friday night walk to the clubhouse, we stopped at Mr. Kelley’s corner store. We each bought a bottle of pop and a bag of candy to enjoy for the night. When we got to the hideout, we opened the box of checkers and started one of our usually intense battles. Even as he concentrated on each move, I could see that Johnny mind was somewhere far away. After each move, he would stare off into the ceiling and not focus in again until his next turn. I could tell his mind was elsewhere as he was making mistakes and I was beating him even more easily than normal. I usually won, but it was always a battle to the very end.
Johnny sipped on his pop as the game went on. The expression on his face became much more serious, although I could tell he didn’t care that he was losing. He was down to his last checker as he laid his head back on the couch.
“You know Friday nights are the worst night,” he said.
I didn’t know what he was talking about, Friday nights were certainly the best night. Before I could question his logic, he continued, “That’s the night he drinks the most.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“On Friday my dad goes out drinking at the speakeasies after he gets off work and doesn’t get home until late. When he gets home, he is always talking loud and wakes everyone in the house up. If my mom tries to quiet him down he slaps her hard across her face and squeezes her throat so hard that she can’t breathe.”
I didn’t know what to say so I just listened.
“He yells about how much money it costs to keep all of us kids and how his life would be better if my mom and all of us kids were gone.”
“There was one night that my dad was hitting my mom so hard that I jumped out of bed and ran into the kitchen,” Johnny said as his eyes began to well up with tears. “I tried to squeeze my body between them and wrestle my father’s hands off of her throat. He pushed my mom so hard that she slammed her body against the wall and fell on the floor.”
I listened in shock, I knew Johnny’s father had problems, but I never knew anything like this was going on in his house.
“Then he grabbed me by the shirt collar and picked me up by my neck and held me up against the wall,” Johnny continued, not making eye contact as he spoke.
“Don’t you ever lift a hand against me or I’ll kill you, do you hear me?” his dad screamed.
“Then he took his fist and punched me right in the face,” Johnny said as he continued to look away from me. “Remember that time I lost a tooth and had a swollen lip, and you asked me about it. And I told you that I feel down in a footrace with one of the kids from St. Monica’s, well that wasn’t the truth.”
“Yea, I remember, but I really did believe you fell down in a foot race, but I had no idea what really happened.”
I wondered how I could have missed hearing all this with the thin walls that separated our two houses. I wondered if my parents had heard what was going on and just never said anything about it to me. Maybe I was a very sound sleeper and I was able to sleep through all the commotion. I wanted to comfort Johnny but I did not know what to say.
“When my mom starts to cry my dad stops hitting her. When I started to cry my dad said I was like a little girl,” Johnny said, speaking very quietly. “And he screamed at me to stop crying.”
We sat as minutes went by, but each minute seemed to last for an hour. I wanted to say something wise and helpful, but nothing came to my mind. I could only think how lucky I was to have the family that I did, but I certainly didn’t want to say that to Johnny.
“You know what we should have?” I asked him. “A secret saying that we could use with each other anytime we were in real trouble, something that nobody else would understand. The phrase would be a way of telling each other that we were in trouble and need help.”
We sat for a few minutes more as I tried to come up with just the right phrase, but nothing came to me. I looked at Johnny but it didn’t seem as if he wanted to spend any time helping me come up with any stupid secret phrase. I threw out some ideas, but as Johnny didn’t respond, I decided to let the whole idea go. We walked home in silence that night. My mind focused on how lucky I was to have a quiet night of sleep ahead. Johnny was probably wondering if his dad was out drinking whiskey, and what kind of Friday night he would have.
7
It was a quiet weekend; Saturday morning spent playing baseball at the cemetery, and Saturday night sitting out on the front stoop of our house with the Garrity family. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood, and as far as I could tell Johnny’s dad wasn’t doing any drinking. Our parents told each other funny stories of how they met and what they did while they were courting.
“I remember the first time I came to court you, I was so nervous that I stood on the corner near your house for thirty minutes before I got up the courage to knock on your door,” my dad said.
“Yea and I watched you the whole time from behind the curtains in my bedroom,” my mom replied with a smile as if she was revealing this for the first time. “At first I was just peeking out so that I would be ready when you came, but then I saw you standing there and couldn’t figure out what you were up to. I couldn’t figure out what was going on in your head, and I thought you might just be crazy.”
My dad laughed not showing any sign of being embarrassed.
Johnny and I stood a few feet away bouncing a rubber ball off the front steps of his house. We had invented another game that we called stoop ball. You would throw the ball as hard as you could at the steps and depending on the angle that it hit it would fly into the street. We laid down boundaries that marked where the ball would land, for a single, double, triple, or home run. If the person you were playing against caught the ball while it was in the air then you were out. Johnny having the stronger throwing arm always seemed to have an advantage.
On this Saturday night, I caught everything he threw up and I ended up winning six runs to two, as we kept track of batters just as if they were the real players. We even had the lineups running in our heads as each batter hit. Stoop ball even had sound, as the person up at bat would pretend he was a radio announcer broadcasting the game and give commentary after each hitter.
“If I don’t become a children’s doctor I might just become a radio broadcaster,” Johnny said as the game ended.
“Maybe I could do that too, and we could become a famous broadcasting team.”
I could see our dads reading the front page of the newspaper as we played.
“Look they just seized ten trucks full of booze in Tacony last night,” I heard my dad say.
Tacony was a section of the city that was not far from where we lived, although I had never been there.
“That’s a shame all that good whiskey getting poured down the drain,” Johnny’s dad shot back. “All them damn politicians telling us what we can and can’t do. Isn’t it bad enough that we have Reverend Casey trying to run our lives?”
With that remark, I could see the smile quickly leave my mother’s face. She didn’t care when the men criticized politicians, but she wasn’t about to let anyone talk badly about Reverend Casey. My dad sensing what she was about to say, gave her a stern look, and my mother took the hint. She did not say a word and looked away in disgust.
“Here’s a sto
ry about the nephew of the old mayor of Merchantville.
They found him dead in a boxcar five hundred miles away from his home,” my dad said, as he obviously wanted to quickly change the subject.
“They said that the body was found all the way in Ohio and that the boy was worth $50,000.00,” said Johnny’s dad.
It didn’t make much sense to me to say someone is worth $50,000.00, which I understood was a lot of money, but how can you put a value on his life. Sure enough when I leaned over to grab one of Johnny’s high pop ups off the step, I saw the newspaper headline “Boy worth $50,000 found dead in boxcar in Ohio.” I wondered where in the world was Merchantville anyway.
Sunday morning was typical and included the early morning going to church ritual. As we ate breakfast, I noticed my mom reading the newspaper a little more intently than she normally did. She was completely engrossed in one of the news articles, and we had a hard time getting her attention. I tried to glance over and see what she was reading, without seeming to be too nosy. It turned out she wasn’t reading an article at all, but was looking at an advertisement for a new electric washing machine. It was for the ABC Washing Machine Company, and the advertisement took up an entire page of the Sunday paper.
Mom read every word; she even had to squint her eyes a bit to read all the small print at the bottom of the page.
My dad ate his breakfast, oblivious to what my
Me, Johnny, and The Babe Page 7
